Change Detection in Wavelength-Resolution SAR Image Stack Based on Tensor Robust PCA

Wavelength-resolution (WR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) change detection (CD) has been used to detect concealed targets in forestry areas. However, most proposed methods are generally based on matrix or vector analyses and, therefore, do not exploit information embedded in multidimensional data. In this letter, a CD method for WR SAR image stacks based on tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) is proposed. The proposed CD method used the new tensor nuclear norm (TNN) induced by the definition of the tensor–tensor product to exploit temporal and spatial information contained in the image stack. To assess the performance of the proposed method, we considered SAR images obtained by the very high-frequency (VHF) WR coherent all radio band sensing (CARABAS)-II SAR system. Experiments for three different stack sizes show that a significant performance gain can be achieved when large image stacks are considered. The proposed CD method performs better in terms of probability of detection (PD) and false alarm rate (FAR) than the other five CD methods in VHF WR SAR images, including one based on matrix robust principal component analysis (RPCA). In a particular setting, it achieves a PD of 99% and an FAR of 0.028 false alarms (FAs) per km2.